Dinner Date
by Lorendiac
Summary: The first conventional "dinner and a movie" date between Huntress and The Question happened offstage, between the scenes of the JLU episode "Question Authority." Let's take a peek at how it went.
1. A Touchy Question of Dining Etiquette

**Author's Note:** This story will have two chapters. It is set _during_ the JLU episode "Question Authority." One scene in there ended with The Question and Huntress about to go on a date—you may recall that she _extorted _him into suggesting "dinner and a movie?" after she decided the subtle approach was completely wasted on him—and then the next scene we saw her in was happening several days later, so details of the actual date were left entirely to our imaginations. For various reasons (which are explained in another note at the end of this chapter), I recently decided it was time to fill that gap in our knowledge.

By the way, this story happens just a few days after my old story "Second Date," which is why there's a brief reference to "Ambush Bug" in this one. (If you don't even know who Ambush Bug is, _don't sweat it_; that's not important to understanding this new story.) The Author's Note at the bottom will give a more detailed chronology for my various Huntress/Question stories.

* * *

**Dinner Date**

**Chapter One: A Touchy Question of Dining Etiquette**

A few minutes ago Q had downloaded everything he needed for the next phase of his investigation while Huntress watched his back by roughing up a platoon of rent-a-cops as light exercise. Now they were back in his sedan, him at the wheel, pulling onto the Interstate to take them back to the city, and it was time to hash out the details of the "dinner and a movie?" invitation which she had squeezed out of him by grabbing his precious data as a hostage.

"So," she said, "what sort of dinner did you have in mind?" As she spoke, she was absently tugging off her own mask and wondering if they needed to swing by her apartment so she could change into a dress.

The car swerved for a moment before Q straightened it out and demanded: "What do you think you're doing?"

She had never before heard him sound _scandalized_. Until she could get a handle on this, she'd stick to the simple facts of the matter. "It's called taking off my mask."

"You actually do that sort of thing on the first date?" A crusty old relic of the Victorian Age, appalled at the sight of what his great-granddaughter considered an adequate number of square inches of fabric to wear for a day at the beach in the 1960s, could not have sounded more disapproving.

Huntress briefly considered and rejected the idea of arguing about whether any or all of their previous joint ventures had qualified as "dates." Fighting other superheroes, and miscellaneous hoodlums, and that Ambush Bug nutcase a few days ago, and some corporate security personnel tonight, were not what most people would define as romantic excursions, but she and Q were not most people. Hadn't each battle been a bonding experience, which ought to count for something?

So she concentrated on the "that sort of thing" part of his query. "Q, am I really showing you anything you haven't seen before? You already knew my real name and family background when you agreed to help me find Mandragora last month. Do you seriously expect me to believe you never ran across _any_ pictures of Helena Bertinelli's unmasked face in your research?"

"That's _different_," he said huffily. "Looking at an old photo is one thing. A superheroine exposing herself this way in the flesh is something else!"

Ah ha! She felt she was finally catching up with his premises. Apparently a mask was a sort of fig-leaf symbol to him, at least where members of the costumed crimefighting community were concerned; it marked the crucial difference between modesty and _indecency._ Far more unnerving than such trivia as her bare navel. With an inward sigh, she replaced her own mask. "I'm a reasonable woman. If it makes you feel better, I'll keep this on while we talk about your taboos."

"Thank you," he said promptly.

"You're welcome. But a question occurs: Since you obviously don't believe the time is ripe for us to see each other barefaced, just how _were_ you planning to eat dinner with me? My mask doesn't cover my mouth, but yours . . ."

"Hrrrm."

At first she thought he was just clearing his throat, but that wordless noise was followed by an increasingly awkward silence. A mile later she said, "You hadn't really figured that part out yet, had you?"

"May I point out that you were the one who rushed me into this?" he inquired. "I had no intention of going out for dinner tonight until you . . . confiscated . . . that data-storage module. Of course I hadn't prepared any detailed plans on that basis!"

(Huntress rather thought that in the nick of time he had substituted "confiscated" for some harsher word, such as "stole." Of course she'd have pointed out that _he_ had stolen the data in the first place, so claiming the moral high ground looked silly . . . anyway, he hadn't said it, so no need to get sidetracked.)

"Okay, okay, but you'd better believe you're stuck with me as a dinner date now. There must be a way to resolve this. How do you feel about cutting an opening across the lower part of your mask, and replacing the whole thing later—"

"No," he said emphatically.

"All right, then it's your turn to make a suggestion."

"We could arrange to eat the entire meal in complete darkness," he ventured.

She blinked. "Pay to rent a private room at a restaurant and then turn out the lights so you can take off your mask?"

"Or get takeout and carry it home to my apartment and turn out those lights, if need be. Either way could work."

Huntress shook her head. "I can just imagine both of us spilling things all over the place in those conditions. What a mess we'd have to clean up." A thought struck her. "Unless you've got lots of _practice_ at deftly handling food with silverware in pitch black rooms?"

"Er . . . no."

"Me neither. Two people trying to learn that trick at once sounds like more trouble than it's worth."

The Question said, "So I've shot down your first suggestion and you've shot down mine. Any other ideas?"

She chewed her lower lip for a moment. "Seems to me that other members of the League must face such problems occasionally. Batman is rumored to be a master of disguise, and as for Nemesis, that's his main schtick! I suppose it's too much to hope that you keep a lifelike disguise stashed away for a rainy day; one that would let you eat without revealing your real features?"

"Never felt the need," he said flatly. "I suppose Nemesis or Batman would be willing to devise something for me, but they are probably working on other cases right now and would want to wrap those up before they took time out to do a friendly favor. I gather you want to have dinner _tonight_; not tomorrow or the day after?"

_The dinner per se isn't so important, but I do want to make you relax for a few hours—specifically with me, and doing things not connected to your work. And since you offered dinner before the movie, I'm not going to let you weasel out of that part now._

She didn't say that. Instead: "Yes, that's still my objective. Let's hear another suggestion from your side."

"Huh. You know, you may have put your finger on a crucial point when you turned down my last offer."

"I did?"

"I mentioned turning out the lights during the meal and eating blind, and you said: 'Two people trying to learn that trick at once sounds like more trouble than it's worth.'"

"So?"

"I think the key word in that sentence might be the number 'two.'"

She struggled to work that out. "You want only one of us at a time to sit down at the table, take off a mask and eat, while the other waits in the next room until it's his or her turn? I'm not sure you're grasping the whole point of '_sharing_ a friendly meal . . .'"

"Not quite what I meant. But if we grant that it would be inefficient to turn out the lights and have _both_ of us floundering in the dark all through dinner . . ." His voice trailed off, and it occurred to her that he might be embarrassed.

"Just spit it out, Q. Where are you going with this line of thought?"

"Well . . . how do you feel about blindfolds?"

Huntress twisted her head to stare at him for a few seconds; then started laughing weakly as she visualized what he had in mind.

_Guess there won't be any tender moments of gazing across the table, looking deep into each other's eyes, during _this_ dinner date. _

After a few more miles, The Question said defensively: "It was a serious suggestion."

She snickered one last time and then stifled it. "Yes, I knew that. It may even be workable. It's just that I don't know any guy except you who would have come up with that approach!"

She took a deep breath and continued. "Check me on this to see if we're on the same page. Since I can eat without taking off my mask, but you can't, I'd be the one wearing the blindfold at the table in your apartment while you were unmasked and could see everything clearly?"

"Yes."

"And I suppose you'd refill my glass when it was getting empty, and dish up second helpings onto my plate if I wanted them, and stop me if I were about to knock something over?"

"Yes."

"And when we agreed that we were done eating, you'd put your mask back on before you gave me the all-clear to remove the blindfold?"

"Yes."

"And then we'd go out to catch a late movie somewhere?"

"Yes."

"Okay! You silver-tongued devil, you talked me into it!"

"I did?" Whatever he did to his voice—electronic distorter, maybe?—when he had the mask on seemed to filter out some of the normal emotional overtones, but this time she was positive he was flabbergasted.

"Well, let's face facts. Your plan gives me what I wanted—dinner and a movie. Not quite how I had envisioned it happening, but the essential items are there. Given that I had to twist your arm to get that much, it behooves me to be willing to compromise on a few details in order to find an approach we can both live with."

"That's . . . very reasonable on your part," he said finally. "I just wasn't sure you'd be willing to look at it that way."

"But now you know." She leaned back in her seat to project the very picture of relaxation. "I hope you realize, though, that I don't let just anyone tie a blindfold on me."

"Of course not!" he said, sounding a trifle shocked at the very idea.

* * *

The negotiations had been bizarre; the dinner itself was fairly normal, even sedate, allowing for the minor oddity of the blindfold. They had settled on Chinese takeout. Lots of cute little cardboard containers giving forth savory odors. Q was quick to please whenever she expressed a wish for a bit more of this or a larger helping of that, and once it was on her plate, she could use a fork or spoon to move it up where it belonged without much trouble.

After Huntress made it clear she didn't want the table talk to be "work-related"—no mention of real-life supervillains, organized crime figures, or red-hot conspiracy theories—she and Q had found common ground in discussing the literary efforts of such mystery writers as Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, and Rex Stout. It came as no great surprise that Q tended to identify with one of Hammett's heroes, the "Continental Op" who had narrated the novels _Red Harvest_ and _The Dain Curse_ and many shorter adventures. Any name the Op ever offered in dialogue was an alias, and no real description of his face was ever provided in the text—making him a sort of proto-Question, if you wanted to look at it that way, despite the absence of a mask in the Op's lifestyle as a private detective in the Roaring Twenties.

By the time they were calling it quits on the other dishes and preparing to nibble on their fortune cookies, nothing untoward had happened, which was disappointing but not surprising from Huntress's perspective.

Normally, when a young woman was alone with a man and then he abruptly dimmed or doused the lights (or even found some excuse to blindfold her; that last variation being unprecedented in Helena Bertinelli's experience), she could reasonably assume the worst about his intentions. Who could forget Carlo Bigliotto, who thought his macho charisma was oozing from every pore? (His new front teeth looked just as good as the old ones ever had.)

Circumstances alter cases, though. Huntress had suspected "the worst," all right, but that phrase carried a whole different meaning this time around. She'd had a horrifying hunch from the beginning that Q was strictly on the level about his reasons for dining this way, and _wasn't_ plotting to so much as steal a kiss after he had her blindfolded, unable to see it coming. The last half hour or so had not provided any evidence to the contrary. What was the world coming to when a girl couldn't even trust a guy to try to take advantage of her in the right time and place?

(Yes, she knew there were still plenty of _other_ guys in the world who would have jumped at the chance to take advantage of her, but they weren't here and she didn't want them to be, so that didn't count.)

Still, it would hardly accomplish anything good to complain about Q's efforts to mind his manners and respect her personal space. She'd just have to keep working on him until he got a clue.

There was an odd hissing noise from across the table, and then he said: "You can take off the blindfold and read your fortune any time you please."

She complied. The printed slip of paper said: YOUR EVERLASTING PATIENCE WILL BE REWARDED SOONER OR LATER.

Huntress decided to consider that a good omen.

* * *

[To Be Concluded: The second chapter will show the discussion they have after they've finished watching the movie. I just have to make up my mind which movie it will be. Details, details!]

* * *

**Author's Note: **I've now written several stories that show us something of Q's perspective, or Huntress's, or both, on their budding romance. Since each story can stand alone, and I don't write them in the same order they happened, I post each as a separate item instead of trying to string it all together as one big serial. In case you care, here's the order in which these events are occurring, from the perspective of the young lovebirds.

1. "Second Date." (Happens shortly before the episode "Question Authority.")  
2. "Dinner Date." (Happens _during_ the episode "Question Authority.")  
3. "Questionable Housekeeping." (Happens shortly after the episode "Divided We Fall.")  
4. "Question of Protocol." (Happens a few days later, and Huntress does not appear onstage, although we learn something about other superheroes' attitudes regarding Q's involvement with her.)  
5. "Filing System." (Happens during or after the final season of the show.)

Just recently I was kicking around a few more ideas about the duo. My first idea was for a story which would be a humorous movie review in the form of lively dialogue between Q and Huntress—and I decided the review would have to be of a movie many of us have seen in the real world, so that my target audience would have a better chance of appreciating Q's quirky viewpoint on whatever film I chose to show him criticizing. Then, as I was chewing on that idea, it occurred to me that I might want to make it a discussion of the _first_ movie they ever saw together, an event which must have happened during their date "between the scenes" of "Question Authority." So far, so good . . .

Then, as I was still chewing on the idea, another thought hit me hard. They didn't just see a movie that night—they were talking about grabbing some dinner first. Which would _seem_ to mean Q had to remove his pseudoderm mask before he could get any of the food into his mouth. Yet in the later episode "Flashpoint," when he was a patient in the Watchtower infirmary, Huntress didn't even know _how_ he gets his mask off until he guided her through the process. And after that happened, his self-deprecating comment about being the ugliest guy in the world, and her reaction (affectionate disagreement), strongly implied that prior to that moment she had _never seen_ the real face of Vic Sage, The Question!

"Hold on!" I said to myself. "Something's wrong with this picture. How did they _previously_ dine together _without_ Huntress ever getting a look at his face?"

I suspect that this was simply a plot hole overlooked by the show's producers at the time, but it was entertaining to start trying to imagine far-fetched scenarios to justify the apparent contradiction. I considered various explanations, and settled on what you've just read as my preferred answer. I hope you found it reasonably funny and convincing!


	2. Dissecting the Movie

**Author's Note:** So I was in a video store a couple of weeks ago, asking myself what Huntress would drag her friend to see on the big screen—anything that came out within the last five years or so in real life was fair game, I felt—and it occurred to me that I had never seen the movie _WALL-E_. I rented the DVD, took it home, popped it into the player, and started making notes on what Huntress and The Question might find particularly interesting, illogical, or otherwise noteworthy as _they_ watched it for the first time. It took me a while to get this whipped into shape, and I'm still not sure how well I did. Anyway, if you haven't seen _WALL-E_ yet, then you need to do one of two things: Either quit reading this right now, or else brace yourself for a ton of spoilers—but don't say I didn't warn you!

* * *

**Chapter Two: Dissecting the Movie**

Looking at the problem carefully, Huntress had decided there were certain types of movies they _weren't_ going to see tonight. The mission statement was to take Q's mind away from his work for awhile. That meant anything relating to superheroics was off the table. Or anything relating to violent crime and the investigation thereof—she didn't really want to hear him complaining about how the detectives on the case should have identified and captured the serial killer at least one murder sooner, for instance. In fact, she'd better play it safe and rule out anything likely to involve lots of people dying—such as war movies based on historical events, or a sci-fi blockbuster with starships hurling destructive energies at one another.

(Sure, she could appreciate an action flick with a high body count as much as the next red-blooded female vigilante, but that just wasn't the tone she wanted _now_.)

Something funny, fluffy, and relaxing seemed apropos. One of the films currently in the theaters was an animated Disney/Pixar feature called _WALL-E_. Family-friendly with cute little robots, she gathered. That ought to fit the bill!

(Her normal expectations of what you'd get when you forked over the cash to view "a Disney movie" had been severely damaged by the _Pirates of the Caribbean_ franchise, but she was now inclined to write that off as a special case.)

Q had put his mask back on before they drove to the theater, but he'd also pulled on a pair of shades and wrapped a scarf around the lower part of his face (or where his face ought to be) so that he wouldn't look _too_ peculiar as they entered the building. He'd removed those props after the lights started to fade out just before the trailers began.

Now, almost two hours later, they were out in the parking lot again. Huntress was feeling almost giddy. It had been quite a while—too long, maybe?—since she had sat down to watch anything so relentlessly sweet and optimistic. (Well, if you brushed aside the whole thing about the Earth's biosphere having been completely ruined for several centuries, but hey, that was just colorful backstory!) Who'd have thought that a love story could be so interesting to a grown woman of the twenty-first century when the principals were non-organic and it appeared that their "relationship" could _never_ be more than platonic?

She wondered how Q had felt about it—he hadn't offered any reactions yet. One thing she had discovered tonight was that he obviously didn't believe in doing much talking during the movie. Probably afraid of drowning out key lines of dialogue which might prove vital for the appreciation of later plot twists. She liked that in a man. Empirical evidence also said he didn't even believe in trying to put an arm across his date's shoulders at some point during the movie; not the first time they went to one, anyway. She normally admired _that_ brand of self-restraint in a guy, as well, but in this case she'd have been willing to make an exception. Which you'd think he would have figured out by now, after the way she'd practically had to drag him to this cinema in the first place.

_Ah well, give it time . . ._

"I think we were over twenty minutes into the film before the 'leading man' (using the term loosely) said _anything_ comprehensible," Q finally observed as they settled back into his car. "That may be some sort of record for anything but a silent picture."

She could have quibbled about whether it was a real record, but preferred to keep the conversation confined to this movie instead. "I did notice that WALL-E and EVE hardly ever said anything except each other's names. Which was kind of sweet, but at first I wondered if they might share lots of data about themselves in high-speed radio transmissions which _we_ couldn't hear. That would make a lot more sense of how quickly they became fascinated with each other. But there was no clear evidence that WALL-E was getting detailed tips from her regarding how things worked aboard that huge ship, the _Axiom,_ after he arrived."

The Question shrugged. "Agreed—it seemed they only learned whatever they could see and hear about one another via the functional equivalents of human senses. But she obviously felt that was enough to let her form a favorable estimate of his character. He was simply a man—or robot—of few words. I can relate to that. _I_ often go days at a time without saying much of anything."

"Believe me, we've all noticed," Huntress muttered half-humorously. Then she added as an afterthought: "Of course WALL-E's excuse was that his designers probably never expected him to _need_ conversational skills in the first place . . ."

If The Question realized that was a good-natured dig at his own social skills (such as they were), he loftily ignored it in favor of staying focused on WALL-E's strengths and weaknesses. "They also neglected his education in areas where they should have known better. Remember when WALL-E was trapped behind a blue force field in a maintenance-and-repair area of the ship?"

"Yes. He was still worried about EVE, so he burned his way out with a laser and went looking for her again."

"Right. Until then, I was working on the theory that he didn't have _any_ built-in firepower. Mainly because he evidently didn't have a clue what a laser-sighting dot looked like. Right before EVE arrived on Earth, WALL-E was trying to chase that glowing red thing on the ground, remember? I knew what it was at first glance, but I was willing to assume WALL-E didn't. Which made sense if he'd never seen a functioning laser in his life. But if he had a powerful one, why didn't he catch on sooner that something was scouting the terrain from overhead?"

"Well, he'd probably never seen anything but himself using a laser beam," she argued. "Or not for the last several centuries, anyway, so why expect that to change on the spur of the moment? And we never saw him using it at low power just for 'sighting' purposes, did we?"

The Question actually took several seconds to chew on that before committing himself. Finally he conceded: "Now that you mention it, I suppose WALL-E might have been programmed to _only_ think of his built-in laser as a _cutting_ tool for extreme situations, with no provision for using it as a rangefinder the rest of the time. It wasn't as if he were intended to fly any aerospace vehicles, or direct artillery fire in a war zone, so he might not need a highly accurate rangefinder at all in his assigned duties at ground level."

"Right! So he may not have been consciously aware that a beam of light could make such a bright red dot, so far away from the source, without burning right through any solid object in its path at the same time! But he had a living friend—the cockroach—so he could extrapolate that when some other odd little thing was moving over the ground in a hurry, it was _probably_ organic—a lightning bug, maybe. If their positions had been reversed, EVE would have figured it out in a hurry, but she was 'born' in a high-tech environment with zillions of other robots running around, so she'd be predisposed to think someone else was scanning the area for reasons unknown."

"And if the discovery surprised her, she'd probably 'return fire' to be on the safe side," The Question observed. "When she did land on Earth a few minutes later, her responses to sudden strange noises and the like definitely showed a 'shoot first and ask questions later' philosophy. It all seemed oddly familiar, as if EVE were channeling . . . a certain masked crimefighter I know."

Huntress puzzled over that for a few seconds. "You mean The Vigilante, with his twin six-shooters and the whole attitude of 'I'm living in a John Wayne movie'?"

After a pause, The Question said in an odd tone, "Not my first thought, but I suppose you have a point there."

She decided he must have been talking about Hawk instead. That bruiser didn't carry a gun, but he did have a quick temper and all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop whenever he saw something worth fighting. Well, at least he also had his brother Dove to try to provide a bit of restraint when needed.

The conversation had hit a lull. After it became clear that Q didn't intend to offer any further comments on EVE's trigger-happy temperament, Huntress threw out another leading question to get the ball rolling again. "Did anything else particularly strike you about the plot?"

"The 'suspenseful' airlock scene seemed like a ridiculous waste of time," he complained. "I found it impossible to _care_ if WALL-E and EVE got vented out into space with the day's garbage or not."

Huntress stared at him in horror. "I cannot _believe_ you just said that!"

Q made an annoyed sound before responding coherently. "Huntress, they didn't even have lungs. Their robot bodies had _already_ been exposed to vacuum for extended periods with no harm done, so why worry if it happened once more? The prospect was about as life-threatening as it would be if I pushed you into a swimming pool."

"Oh." Huntress felt deflated. Just when she'd been preparing a scathing lecture regarding bigotry towards artificial intelligences . . . but he had a point. She remembered being a bit surprised, earlier on, when WALL-E successfully hitchhiked by clinging to the _exterior_ of a smaller spaceship all the way from Earth to the mothership. She had fully expected him to sneak _inside_ the vessel just before takeoff; that was what she would have done in his place . . .

"All right," she finally conceded, "I'm seeing your position now. Those two sure didn't look like they were _suffering_ earlier, when they were doing that impromptu flying dance routine outside the ship after EVE was thrilled that both WALL-E and her precious plant had survived an explosion. And they were able to get back inside the mothership P.D.Q. once they felt like it—so going out the airlock probably wouldn't leave them permanently locked out the second time around."

"Yes indeed." The Question added thoughtfully, "I've never watched a pair of lovestruck robots _cavorting_ in zero-gee before. Just when you think you've seen it all . . ."

She had _loved_ that scene, but there wasn't much more to say about it in any cerebral way, so she deftly switched the subject again to keep the discussion alive. "So what did you think of the Captain, once we got to know him? For a man who had spent pretty much his entire life in a floating chair looking at status reports that said 'nothing has changed lately,' I thought he did amazingly well toward the end, after he realized the time had come for _serious_ change! Makes me wonder just how they selected new Captains in the first place. Sheer stubbornness, maybe?"

"He showed true grit," Q conceded, "and I suppose he'll learn soon enough that you can't just plant one little seed and watch it grow up to be an entire pizza, ripe for the plucking. On the other hand, I became perplexed as to why it seemed he had never quite understood _why_ the vessel's five-year mission had lasted seven centuries and counting."

Huntress searched her memory. "Well, he said plainly that it would be an _unprecedented_ event if one of the EVE probes had actually brought back a viable sample of photosynthesis from the latest recon mission. Doesn't that show he knew Earth was in a very bad state?"

"Yes, I thought so at the time. But later on, the Captain was shocked and confused by the sharp discrepancies between old video imagery of terrestrial civilization at its best, on the one hand . . . and the footage of the bleak landscape EVE had witnessed during her recent trip, on the other! As if it had never dawned on him that the reason they were still in space after all these generations was because the homeworld had become _uninhabitable_ shortly after their ancestors left?"

She pondered that. To prove a point, AUTO had eventually shown the Captain a clip of that global CEO of a bygone era, whatever-his-name-was, ordering the good ship _Axiom_ not to come back because of the cascading disasters taking place on the Earth's surface—the implication being that the Captain, in all his life up until that moment, had _never known_ that such disasters were precisely why the _Axiom's _voyage had dragged on indefinitely? No, that sure didn't jibe well with the earlier idea that the Captain knew darn well the EVE probes had consistently tried and _failed_ to find any plant life whatsoever back on Earth (until the time of the movie) . . .

"I'm starting to see your point. It's as if the writers simply couldn't make up their minds about 'what did the Captain know and when did he know it?'"

"Yes indeed."

"So . . . what does all this add up to? You didn't like the overall experience?"

"What are you talking about?" he demanded. "I _loved_ it! I just felt it could have been _even better_ if someone had given the script a bit more polish. You didn't think I was so fussy that I demanded absolute perfection in every little thing in this life, did you? "

"Well," she said, just oozing mock humility, "as far I know, you never showed the slightest personal interest in any of the _other_ women you met on the Watchtower . . ."

Q either took that at face value or else had enough sense to play along. "Hrrrm. There _is_ that . . . all right, I can see how you might have assumed I had extremely high standards in many _other_ areas as well . . ."

That was as close as he'd ever yet come to paying her a compliment on her good looks, et cetera. It felt like a victory—even if she'd shamelessly fished for it in a way she might well have derided in some other woman. Now the $64,000 question was: Would he decide he was on a roll and continue along the same general lines to investigate how susceptible she was to flattery?

Not wanting to disrupt his chain of thought if he was in fact thinking along those lines, Huntress kept her lip zipped and waited. She thought she could just feel the unspoken tension building and building inside the car . . .

"Well, this has all been fun," he finally said as he twisted the key in the ignition and the engine rumbled itself awake. "Now, if I can just drop you off at your apartment building, I can rush home and get cracking on that encrypted data. After you return it," he added, in case she had somehow missed the point and forgotten that the module he wanted was still stashed in her utility belt.

_You just _had_ to ruin the moment, didn't you? Defense mechanism? Ah well, you've been a pretty good sport about this . . . once you knew I had you over a barrel. _

Huntress forced a smile and fished the confiscated item out of the appropriate compartment. "It's all yours. Y'know, we really ought to do this again sometime."

The Question delicately removed the data storage module from between her fingers and then asked in a suspicious tone, "You mean you're planning to hold my evidence for ransom every time we work together from now on? Is that supposed to be reassuring?"

He was joking, right?

She was _pretty_ sure he was joking.

At least a fifty-fifty chance, anyway?

Finally she said, in the same tone she would use to explain a rule of basic etiquette to a child whose education was lacking in that area, "Let me offer you a friendly tip, Q. In the normal course of events, at this point in the proceedings, I'd expect the guy to express some real _interest_ in the idea of seeing me again—and maybe even his _regret_ that this date had to end—as opposed to being in a _hurry_ to drop me off, and even expressing doubts about whether he really wanted me to tag along on his next field investigation."

"That's very interesting," he said politely, "but if 'normal' is what you truly crave in your social life, then why you are wasting time with _me?_"

_Ouch! Walked right into that one, didn't I? Good grief, isn't it the _girl_ who's supposed to play hard-to-get? It's looking more and more as if I'll have to continue to take the initiative if I want a second date to happen at all. Heck, given how hard it evidently was, a while back, for him to even admit he "liked" me, it's not ridiculous to assume he's still very _shy_ about this sort of thing. Which at least means he isn't likely to start flirting with half a dozen other women when my back is turned. Let's raise the stakes a little._

"Q, do you really want me to start listing what I see as your strengths and weaknesses, with emphasis on the weaknesses which I hope you'll work to improve?"

"Not right this minute, no," he said promptly.

"Then we'll just have to get together some other time so I can give that last question of yours a _complete_ answer regarding why I haven't given up on you _yet_, won't we?"

He hesitated before making a show of surrendering. "That's odd reasoning, but it has a certain logic. The main problem is that I can't offer an exact date and time for such a rendezvous when I have no idea how long it will take me to read this data or to follow up on any urgent matters arising. I can call you after I'm all done, but who knows when that will be?"

"That's all right," Huntress said comfortably. "If you _fail_ to call me up within a reasonable interval, I'll just have to come looking for you."

He didn't reply as he pulled the car out of the parking lot; he _probably_ thought she was joking a little. But he didn't vehemently object to her proposed measures either, so she decided she could interpret that as tacit permission to break into his apartment and interrupt his work when the time came.

* * *

**Author's Note: **Well, that's the end of this little two-parter about their first conventional date. I have at least one or two other ideas for stories about this odd couple, set later on, but I have no idea when I will get around to writing them. I want to make some serious headway on a few of my longer and unfinished fanfic serials first!


End file.
